Tour of Duty: Samurai, Military Service in Edo, and the Culture of Early Modern Japan

Alternate attendance (sankin kotai) was one of many central institutions of Edo-interval (1603-1868) Japan and one of the most unusual examples of a system of enforced elite mobility in world history. It required the daimyo to divide their time between their domains and town of Edo, the place they waited upon the Tokugawa shogun. Based on a prodigious quantity of research in both revealed and archival major sources, Tour of Obligation renders alternate attendance as a lived expertise, for not only the daimyo but additionally the samurai retainers who accompanied them. Past exploring the character of travel to and from the capital in addition to the period of enforced bachelorhood there, Constantine Vaporis elucidates--for the primary time--the significance of alternate attendance as an engine of cultural, intellectual, material, and technological exchange.
Vaporis argues against the view that cultural change merely emanated from the center (Edo) and reveals more advanced patterns of cultural circulation and production taking place between the domains and Edo and among distant elements of Japan. What's generally called "Edo tradition" in actual fact included elements from the localities. In some cases, Edo acted as a nexus for exchange; at different times, tradition traveled from one space to a different without passing through the capital. In consequence, even those who did not instantly participate in alternate attendance skilled a world much bigger than their own. Vaporis begins by detailing the character of the journey to and from the capital for one explicit massive-scale area, Tosa, and its men and goes on to research the political and cultural meanings of the processions of the daimyo and their in depth entourages up and down the highways. These parade-like actions were replete with symbolic import for the nature of early trendy governance. Later chapters are concerned with the bodily and social setting skilled by the daimyo's retainers in Edo; in addition they tackle the query of who went to Edo and why, the network of physical areas in which the domainal samurai lived, the problem of staffing, political power, and the daily lives and consumption habits of retainers. Lastly, Vaporis examines retainers as carriers of tradition, each in a literal and a figurative sense. In doing so, he reveals the significance of travel for retainers and their identification as shoppers and producers of tradition, thus proposing a multivalent mannequin of cultural change.




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